Qualia wants to be the company that finally makes closings easy. With another $33 million to work toward that goal, the startup has a leg up.
Qualia raised $33 million in a Series B funding round earlier this month. The round, led by Menlo Ventures, more than quadrupled the $7 million the startup raised for a Series A round in 2015.
Nate Baker
“There are a lot of people who think about the problem generally — how do we make real estate better?” Qualia co-founder Nate Baker, who started the company with Lucas Hansen and Joel Gottsegen, told Inman in an interview. “But I don’t think anyone else has taken the specific view, how do we really improve the closing?”
Qualia thinks of itself as the “Domino’s pizza tracker” of real estate closings: an easy-to-follow, step-by-step tracking tool that tells you exactly where in the process your pizza — or your home — is. (A group of techies at Inman’s Hacker Connect in San Francisco in August worked on an offer tracking app also inspired by Domino’s pizza app.)
With this influx of cash, Qualia plans to grow its distribution among its main customers: title companies, lenders and real estate agents. Buyers and sellers can also see the progress of their closings through Qualia, but they’re not the company’s main targets.
The company plans to grow its teams working on product marketing and finance in San Francisco and on sales and customer service in Austin, Texas. In San Francisco, Qualia’s team will also work on new product offerings.
Qualia says that 5 percent of the U.S. real estate market uses Qualia for closings, and that half of the top 100 brokerages are signed up for the product.
The company is focused specifically on closings, leaving the rest of the home transaction process open for innovation from the dozens of other real estate tech startups.
“Qualia is a great example of a modern system of record that dramatically improves workflows, coordinates all key constituents and has a powerful network effect,” Menlo Ventures partner Tyler Sosin said in a statement. “The Qualia team has a unique perspective on one of the most acute pain points in the real estate industry, the closing process, and are poised to become the industry’s default real estate transaction platform.”
